


The Twelfth Step

by Geonn



Category: Original Work
Genre: Addiction, F/F, Seattle, Succubi & Incubi, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-04
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-02 22:30:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4076164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geonn/pseuds/Geonn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A succubus has decided it's finally time for her to change her ways. Fortunately there's a group for that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Twelfth Step

At first she only came for the cookies. The meetings were something to do, distractions, easy and free ways to occupy a few hours. They met in Multi-Purpose Room B at the local library, a group of twelve people who traveled from all across Puget Sound to sit in a circle in a dingy basement. Rudy Cavanaugh respected their dedication. She intended to quit, too, but she didn’t need some touchy-feely group once a month to help her out. All she was looking for was a distraction. And the cookies.

Rudy nibbled on one of the cookies as the rest of the group slowly filtered in. Some of them drove more than an hour to be at the meeting. It was the only one of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, so sacrifices had to be made and the locals had to be patient. She appeared to be one of the youngest people in the group, but she knew that wasn’t necessarily true. None of them looked older than fifty, save for the older woman knitting at Rudy’s four o’clock. Rudy looked like she was on the young side of thirty, but that was far from the truth. Unlike some addictions, hers kept her looking young.

The group leader, who appeared to be in his mid-forties, closed the door and moved to take his seat. “Okay, I think most of us are here. Why don’t we go ahead and get started. I’m Robert, and I’ve been clean for eighteen years and thirty-one days.”

“Hi, Robert,” the group echoed back to him.

Rudy wiped the crumbs from her pants and sat up straighter. The group had only cribbed their format from Alcoholics Anonymous, but they weren’t associated with it. There would be no recitation of prayers or handing themselves over to a higher power. They were only there to talk and offer support to one another. It was the camaraderie that brought her back each month. Robert completed his introduction and scanned the circle.

“I see we have a few new faces with us tonight. Would anyone like to be the first to share?” A balding man with thick glasses raised his hand a few inches and Robert nodded toward him. “Okay. What’s your name?”

“Uh. Hi.” He looked around the room. “My name is actually Robert, too...”

Robert smiled. “That’s okay, we won’t make you change it.”

The group laughed softly, and the ice was broken. The second Robert cleared his throat and began talking. Rudy barely listened to the stories anymore. She didn’t need to know their details. Odds were good that she would just hear variations of the same thing over and over again. Bizarro twists on events from her own life. The real strength came from being in the room with so many people suffering the same way she was. Just sharing the space took some of the edge off. It wasn’t a cure, but it helped her get through the rest of the month a little easier than if she had skipped.

When Robert finished speaking, they moved on to another confession. Rudy spent the time watching the others in the group. Her eyes rested on Celeste, an older woman with hair the color of burnt firewood and eyes that were gray or blue depending on what outfit she wore. Celeste was tall and elegant. Her lips were always slightly pursed, as if she was mentally judging everyone she saw and they were coming up lacking in one way or another. 

Celeste felt Rudy’s attention and returned the gaze. The corners of her mouth curled slightly at the corners as she lifted her chin in acknowledgement of the stare. Celeste was a mistake. Celeste was a Band-Aid for a larger problem. Celeste was older, and married, and gorgeous, and God Ruby wanted to cross the room and settle in Celeste’s lap. Kiss her hard and rip open that shirt so the buttons flew--

“Rudy?”

From the tone of Robert’s voice, it was clear he’d said her name several times. Celeste smiled and ducked her chin as Rudy looked at the group leader.

“Yes?”

“Anything you’d like to share this month?”

She sucked her bottom lip. “Nope. No, nothing... nothing really.”

Robert smiled. “This group isn’t just about maintaining a forward momentum. It’s about accepting our faults and out missteps.”

“Sorry. Nothing to report. I had a good couple of weeks.”

He waited. She knew his tricks; he would wait until the silence became unbearable and she blurted out something else. She didn’t give him the satisfaction. Finally he moved on to someone else, and Rudy leaned back in her seat. Celeste was looking at her with a smug grin. Rudy kept her hands where they were as she slowly unfolded her middle fingers. Celeste chuckled silently and reached up to finger the collar of her shirt as she turned back toward the latest speaker.

The meetings lasted an hour and a half. When they finished, Rudy went to the refreshment table to grab a few cookies for the road. She sensed Celeste sliding up behind her even before she felt the light brush of fingers on her arm. She did her best not to recoil as she turned to face the other woman.

“Hello, Rudy.”

“Hi. I was just grabbing a midnight snack.”

“Midnight is a long time from now. Do you have plans until then?”

Rudy slipped away before Celeste could pin her to the table. “Not really. Just relaxing at home.”

“Care for company?”

“I think your husband might take issue with that.” She lifted her leather jacket from the back of her seat and pulled it on. 

Celeste pressed against her from behind. She gathered a handful of Rudy’s thick black hair and shifted it to the other shoulder. “He’s not important. Have you really been a good girl all month, Rudiger?” Her voice was barely louder than a sigh now, and Rudy’s eyes drifted shut as she fought the urge to surrender. Celeste’s lips brushed her earlobe and she felt it between her legs like an electric volt. “Good girls deserve rewards.”

Rudy knew how easy it would be to say yes. She could all but see herself stretching out in bed - or, hell, it would have to be in the backseat of Celeste’s car at this point - and letting herself be stripped naked. She bit down hard on her bottom lip as she fought the mental image. If she didn’t envision it, then it wasn’t real. She pushed her hands against Celeste’s arms and stepped away from her.

“I’m going home.”

Celeste pouted out her bottom lip. “Alone?”

“Yes.” She tugged at her jacket, mussed her hair, and turned on her heel. She brushed past Robert without saying goodbye or thanking him for the meeting. She knew she would hear about that at the next one. She didn’t care. It was worth the lecture to escape the seductress. 

The basement of the library had other Multi-Purpose Rooms set up for X-Anonymous meetings, and she hurried past doors marked for Alcoholics, Narcotics, Overeaters, Nar-Anon, and Sex Addicts Anonymous. The meeting she’d just run out of didn’t have a sign on the door because they didn’t like to advertise what they were. None of the other variously anonymous visitors would have believed the truth even if it had been written out in black and white.

Rudy was greeted by a gust of cold air as she pushed outside. She closed her eyes and let the breeze wash over her like a cleansing breath. The arousal stoked by Celeste dissipated slowly, even if it didn’t completely go away. A dark ember in the back of her mind told her to run, to find the nearest bar and sniff out an eager young partner to drag into the alley. She wet her lips at the thought but then flinched and shook her head.

She would go home. She would sit in front of the computer and watch something online. Then she would go to bed with either her hand or her battery-operated girlfriend. She would spend the night alone, just as she had for most of the past five years. She knew that succumbing to Celeste wouldn’t count toward her ‘sobriety,’ but there was a principle that had to be respected. She needed to resist any and all temptation. She also told herself that she was respecting Celeste’s recovery by saying no. They would both benefit.

Of course they would both benefit from a long, sweaty night of... Rudy sighed and growled at herself before that line of thinking went much farther. She started walking in the hopes the cold air and the exercise would help get her mind off of things it shouldn’t be thinking about. The other anonymouses had it easy, she thought. A drunk could avoid bars, and an overeater could just turn away from a bakery. But for her, the entire world was a threat. 

Abstinence was so much harder when sex was her drug of choice, and sobriety was not kind to a succubus.

#

Rudiger Cavanaugh was born in 1875, the daughter of an incubus and a human woman. She discovered her supernatural nature when she became sexually active and drained the life force from her partner. She only took a little, so her victim survived, but she quickly learned that if she wasn’t careful she could drain them until she was left with a husk. The next morning she felt healthier, stronger, and more alive than she ever had. When the feeling began to fade, she found the first willing boy in a bar and dragged him home. He was her first victim, but only because her needs weren’t satisfied. She needed sexual fulfillment to properly feed, and she could only get that from one kind of partner.

Rudiger was actually her brother’s name. She cut her hair short, stole his clothes, and rode a horse fifteen miles to a different town so no one would know her family. She seduced young women she met in the pub. It wasn’t hard. She was a gorgeous boy, and the girls were more than willing to be the recipient rather than the giver. She made them come and left them passed out in the nearest comfortable place she could find. In the morning they would wake exhausted and weak, but they would eventually recover.

By the turn of the century she realized that feeding kept her young. As long as she didn’t go too long without having sex, she never aged and she never got sick. This posed a problem for those who knew her as a twenty-year-old girl from the Cavanaugh family. So she began to move around so no one would discover her secret. By that time she’d masqueraded as Rudiger for so long that her own name sounded foreign. She doubted he would mind if she kept using it.

From Germany to Bruges, south into France, up to London, then across to the United States, she remained mobile. She never settled in one place long enough to get noticed. Sometimes a move was necessitated by a particularly potent feed, when she left her poor victim sucked dry. She tried to find people who wouldn’t be missed, but that led to an uncomfortable feeling of being judge, jury, and executioner.

She tried to gauge her feedings so her lovers-slash-victims were left weakened but alive. She took what she needed to remain young and nothing more. She liked being twenty, twenty-two at the oldest, and bedding women was a small price to pay in order to keep that youth. She liked to think the women she seduced also got something out of their encounters. She was a very generous lover. She had to be. She couldn’t feed from an unsatisfied partner. 

Sometimes she kept up her disguise as a man. She found gay men to be interesting conquests, even if it was sometimes difficult to keep them from groping her. But the name Rudiger wasn’t common in twenty-first century America. When she went by Rudy the name worked even better. The new century also made it easier to be completely open about her desires. She wanted women. They tasted better and she stayed satisfied longer. 

In the past few decades she’d moved across the United States before ending up in Seattle. She lived in a studio apartment with a cliché view of the Space Needle. The apartment was luxurious, but she was still living well below her means. A century of steady work and frugal saving meant that she could have bought any penthouse or a palatial residence with a view of the water. Hell, she could have bought an island and built a private home on it. But the secret to remaining undiscovered was subtlety.

She left the lights off when she entered her home. The urge to get laid was still present but she fought it back. She didn’t even want to self-gratify because that would tempt the demon within her, stoke the fires until the temptation to run out and find a victim was too great to ignore. She could fight her base desires. It was just a matter of willpower.

She left a trail of clothes through her apartment, ducking around the shower curtain and twisting the cold water nozzle to full. She bit back a scream as the water doused her, arms and legs stiff as she bowed forward and let it wash over her head and down her back. Celeste was a supposedly reformed succubus like everyone else at the group, but she’d “fallen off the wagon” so many times Rudy suspected she was just using the meetings as a hunting ground. Rudy had fallen for the trick more times than she cared to admit at the cost of her own abstinence. 

Fifteen years ago, she’d been just like any other succubus or incubus. Find someone, drag them somewhere to get horizontal, feed, and move on until the urge began creeping up again. She left her victims alive more often than not, and the ones that she took a “full meal” from were those who deserved to be eliminated from the planet. She would target men who were pestering women at clubs by offering a plaything they didn’t have to fight for. She watched for the men who were well-practiced at slipping things into girls’ drinks. 

She never took a woman’s life. She wanted her times with women to be all about mutual pleasure. She even felt guilty when she knew her partner would have to call in sick Monday because she’d fed so well. New York to Boston to Augusta, down to Atlanta and then across the continent, she left a trail of dead men and well-fucked women in her wake, and she never looked back. 

Her life changed in Chicago. She met a professor named Angela York while waiting for the bus. Angela was fifty years old, making her appear thirty years older than the brash young punk standing next to her when Rudy was actually the elder in their relationship. Awkward conversation between strangers turned into a dinner date, and dinner turned into what turned out to be Angela’s first lesbian experience. Rudy remembered the hand on her cheek and the warm buzz from the alcohol they drank with dinner as Angela made the confession.

“I’ve wanted this all my life. I’ve just always been too afraid to admit it.”

Rudy had kissed the inside of Angela’s wrist and told her to relax. “Just sit back and let me show you,” Rudy said. Then she did something she’d rarely ever done: she made love without feeding. Their night together was just about making love and being together. Rudy lay awake long after Angela fell asleep beside her and tried to figure out what the experience meant.

They dated for close to a year. Rudy occasionally fed from Angela, but never enough to make the other woman think chronic exhaustion was a side effect of lesbian sex. She only took enough to keep her healthy and was surprised to notice she’d started to age in only a few weeks. The signs were extremely subtle but easy to notice for someone who had seen the exact same face in the mirror for over a hundred years. Soon she was twenty-one, and she allowed Angela to throw her a party in celebration of the date.

Everything crashed down at the party. They filled a private room at a posh restaurant with their friends and coworkers. Drinks were flowing free, and soon Rudy was drunk enough to make a monumental mistake. She decided that she’d spent long enough sipping from Angela when all she wanted was to drown herself in someone. She didn’t want to hit her lover that hard, so she found a sexy little redheaded waitress and invited her into the back room.

When Angela came looking for her, she found Rudy’s head locked tightly between the thighs of the waitress. Angela was humiliated. She’d officially come out of the closet because of Rudy. They had been talking about moving in together. Angela fled the restaurant and Rudy pursued her all the way to the El station. They fought on the platform, aired every grievance that had come up in their months of dating, but it all circled back around to one thing.

“I can forgive so many things, Rudy, but I can never forgive someone for cheating on me. Can you swear it will never happen again?”

Rudy tried to say the words Angela needed to hear, but she couldn’t make herself lie. She knew her own weaknesses. So when the train arrived, Angela stepped aboard and told Rudy not to follow. The doors closed and the train slipped out of the station. 

She turned off the shower and toweled the moisture from her body. If the story had just ended there, if she’d let Angela slip through her fingers never to be seen again, Rudy’s life might be completely different. She might have thrown herself back into the feeding pool, gorging herself on hot party girls and budding young would-be rapists. Instead she drowned her sorrows in drink. A few weeks passed before she got the liquid courage necessary to face Angela again. She went to Angela’s apartment. They fought again. They had angry sex, break-up sex, a final goodbye to put a final stop on their time together. 

Rudy was drunk.

Rudy had gone so long without feeding.

In her fervor, hunger, and rage, Rudy killed Angela.

Being drunk on both alcohol and her first proper feed in a year, it took her a moment to realize what she had done. She didn’t have the capacity to think. Even if she had, her brain would have told her it wouldn’t work. But panic overruled logic and she placed her mouth over Angela’s in classic CPR position and forced the energy out of her. It felt like someone had set fire to her vital organs, burning her to a crisp from a single swallowed cinder, but it worked. Angela gasped and coughed, drew a deep breath, and clutched at her throat.

“What the hell just happened?”

“I... think you had a heart attack.”

Angela groaned and began pushing at Rudy. “Get out.”

“We should call someone. An ambulance. Just to check--”

“Rudy, get out of my apartment right now.”

Rudy knew there would be no reconciliation. Not now, not ever. And given what she had just done, she didn’t trust herself with one. So she grabbed her clothes, dressed quickly in the living room, and left Angela’s apartment for the final time. She left Chicago two days later, running as far as she possibly could from the near-disaster. On the road to Seattle she took her final victim: a bored girl in her early twenties working the clerk at some middle-of-nowhere hotel in Montana. When Rudy left she looked a year younger, effectively erasing the time she’d spent with Angela.

What she couldn’t erase were the effects it had on her heart. She liked being in a relationship. She liked coming home every night to the same person. And to her great surprise, fucking someone for the hundredth time was just as exciting as the first time. She decided she would use the Emerald City as her clean slate. No more feeding. Just because she was a succubus didn’t mean she was forced to feed. She could abstain, grow old, and die like a regular human. 

Looking in the mirror now, fifteen years later, she saw a twenty-eight year old woman staring back at her. She tried to fight the urges but sometimes they were too strong. When she did feed, she took as little as possible. She would shave off a year or two, maybe thirty months, but she would never drop back to twenty. She planned to stay in Seattle a good long time, and being forever twenty-five was enough to cause problems.

Celeste was technically safe. A succubus couldn’t feed off another succubus, or an incubus for that matter. Technically their dalliances weren’t considered falling off the wagon. Masturbation didn’t count, either. Couldn’t siphon life from yourself, after all. But she wanted to do it right. She didn’t want cheats or workarounds. She wanted life. She wanted love. If she could just train herself to be a human rather than a succubus, she felt like she had a chance the next time she found someone to love.

Rudy put on her pajamas and went to bed. She was prepared for a long road to health, to her own special kin of sobriety. When she started out she knew it wouldn’t be like flipping a switch. She had to unlearn a hundred and twenty years of self-conditioning. Still, sometimes it felt like she would be in her nineties by the time she was finally ready for a relationship.

She hoped there were a lot of eligible lesbians in whatever nursing home she ended up in.

#

Exercise was a great substitute for sex. Her building had a fully-equipped gym on the first floor, and Rudy spent much of her free time there. Her new addictions were stirring up her endorphins and producing sweat, burning calories, running on a treadmill until she was too exhausted to do anything but collapse into her bed and sleep until morning. The irony was that now she looked better than ever, and there was no one to appreciate it. 

She finished her workout and changed into sweatpants and a hoodie so she could jog outside. It didn’t feel like real exercise if she didn’t get a little fresh air at the same time. She went down to the waterfront and set out, setting a casual pace as she ran north along the viaduct. There was a light drizzle but she barely noticed it. Her earbuds were in and she had tuned the iPod to a bootleg recording of a jazz show she’d actually attended. Late ’45, when everyone was still reeling from the end of the war and grateful to be alive. 

Rudy was thinking about the singer, a French chanteuse named Liana who had worked for the resistance. After the show Rudy had used her succubus wiles to get backstage and meet the gorgeous singer. They shared a bottle of champagne and went down on each other in the dressing room. Seventy years later the crisp scent of Seattle rain was momentarily replaced by the smoke of a cramped nightclub, the taste of cheap champagne, and the delicious taste of Liana’s sex as Liana sang to her from across the decades.

She was drawn back to the present by a sharp crack and a banshee’s shriek. She stopped and pulled the earbuds free as she turned toward the road where a car had just been knocked forty-five degrees onto the grass. Its windshield was shattered and the driver’s side quarter was a mangled mess of steel and plastic. Smoke was rising from beneath the hood in lazy plumes.

Rudy’s sneakers slipped on the wet grass and mud as she ran to the wreck. The other driver’s car was just taillights turning a corner by the time she reached the vehicle. The driver’s side window was broken out, and Rudy could see a blonde woman slumped against the seatbelt. The airbag had deployed and lay deflated in the woman’s lap. Rudy fought her pocket for control of the cell phone within and she jabbed the screen to call 911. She could hear sirens but she couldn’t assume they were coming to this accident.

“This is Rudy Cavanagh at... at, uh...” She looked around to get her bearings before she gave the address. “There was an accident. The other driver just took off. I think there’s only the driver in the car, and she looks like she’s hurt.” 

The operator told her that EMTs were on their way, and she moved closer to the car. She rested one hand on the door, careful of the broken glass in the window frame, and reached in to touch the driver’s cheek. In the few minutes since the accident, her hair and one side of her shirt were already wet from the drizzle. Rudy moved her hand to the woman’s throat and her heart sank when she didn’t feel a pulse. The sirens she’d heard earlier were moving farther away. 

“Come on.” She straightened and looked around, but it was too early for many pedestrians to be around. She looked back at the driver. She bent down again, leaned into the car, and fit her lips over the driver’s as she had so long ago for Angela. She felt the power seeping out of her. It had been so long since she fed that she was drawing from her own life force but she didn’t care. She felt as if she had fastened her lips around a live wire. 

Rudy pulled away just as the woman gasped and began to cough. She put her hands on the woman’s shoulders to keep her from moving too much. “Hey! Hey, there you are. Just sit still, okay? You’re going to be fine. The EMTs are on their way.”

“What happened?”

“You had an accident.” Flashes of light caught her eye. She looked up and saw the ambulance speeding toward them. “They’re going to take care of you.”

The woman reached up and took Rudy’s hand. “Thank you.”

Rudy nodded and squeezed the woman’s fingers. She stepped back as the EMTs moved in to do their work. When she reached the sidewalk she could see herself in the glass of the building’s front door. Her hair was threaded with white, and laugh lines bracketed her mouth. She touched her face in shock, then chuckled and closed her eyes. No wonder she felt weak. No wonder she felt the strength seeping from her legs even as she stood and swayed on her feet.

As she collapsed, she was sure that anyone watching would assume she had simply passed out from the excitement of the moment.

#

Her closest estimate was that she’d lost seventeen years by saving the woman’s life. Her hair was mostly untouched except for the dusting of gray at the temples and in the part. Once she got used to the age lines in her face she decided it was a good look for her. She knew that she could get her old face back with a quick blowjob or fingering someone at a club, but she held off. She would keep the age she’d earned for a few weeks at least. If anyone questioned it she would just say she’d been sick. People were willing to accept absolutely anything other than the supernatural when given some kind of explanation. 

The name of the woman she saved was Caroline Gleeson. She was a stylist at a boutique downtown. Not some powerful CEO, no important celebrity, not even a mother whose children needed her. She was just a woman who was cruelly interrupted when going about her day. Rudy was glad it wasn’t someone quote-unquote important. If she had to sacrifice a decade of her life, she wanted it to go to someone who really mattered. 

Still, she wasn’t keen on meeting. Caroline got her information from the EMTs and emailed her a month after the accident to see if they could get a cup of coffee sometime. Rudy’s instinct was to decline and let the encounter fade into the past for them both. Hiding had been her modus operandi for her entire life. Lingering was how someone got caught, and it was just dumb to revisit your victims.

But Caroline wasn’t a victim. Rudy didn’t think there was a word for what she was... a benefactor? The only person who had benefited from her gift was Angela. Meeting Caroline would be a way to check up on her old girlfriend by proxy. Maybe it would bring closure, maybe it wouldn’t, but she felt like she couldn’t pass on the opportunity.

They met at a coffee shop near the accident site. Rudy arrived first so she could see when Caroline came in. Her plan failed because she was distracted by her hands. They were an old person’s hands, aged and faded compared to what she was used to. She flexed her fingers and then folded them into a fist. She was rubbing the pad of her thumb over her fingertips when a shadow fell over her table.

“Miss Cavanaugh?”

Rudy looked up and smiled. “Caroline. Hello.”

“Hi.” Her hair was cut shorter than it had been during their last meeting. It suited her extremely well. She smiled nervously and took the seat across from Rudy. “I’ve been thinking about what I was going to say ever since you agreed to meet me. I never really settled on anything.”

Rudy shook her head. “Why? I’m no one special.”

“Of course you are. You saved my life.”

“I just called 911.”

Caroline said, “And if you hadn’t, who would have? And there’s... the other thing.”

Rudy’s fingers tensed around the handle of her mug. “What other thing?”

“The EMTs took me to the hospital just so I could get checked out and so their initial diagnosis could be confirmed. Despite the blood, despite losing consciousness, and the damage to my car... I was fine. All the evidence said I should have been really badly hurt. But I didn’t even have a concussion. Even if you feel fine, there’s nothing as unsettling as seeing a doctor stare at you with so much confusion on his face. They truly didn’t know how I survived that accident.”

Rudy shrugged. “Sometimes people get lucky.”

“I remember being unconscious,” Caroline said. “And I remember...” She rubbed her lips together and fussed with her hands. “I remember a pull. Being pulled. It was sort of like falling and flying at the same time. Or... you know when you’re asleep and suddenly your arms and legs will twitch just enough to wake you up? It was like that.”

Rudy said, “How unusual.”

Caroline said, “Yeah...” The waitress interrupted them with a carafe. Rudy got a refill and Caroline got her first cup. “What did you do to me?”

“I didn’t--”

“Please.” She didn’t look away or give Rudy a chance to escape. “I accept the fact something unusual happened. I came here expecting to hear something unbelievable.”

Rudy bought herself a few seconds by taking a sip of her coffee.

Caroline didn’t give an inch. “Someone once told me that we’re never done learning. There’s no end to the discoveries waiting to be made in the world. To believe we know everything is the height of idiocy. I believe there are things waiting to be known every single day. If you tell me you did something to me, it would be easier to take than just assuming I survived a horrible car accident with minor scratches and bruises. So please. Try me.”

Rudy put down her coffee. “I’m a succubus. I take the energy from people by having sex with them. It keeps me young and healthy. I’ve been trying to stop myself from feeding too much, so I didn’t have a lot to spare when your accident happened. I used a lot of my own energy to bring you back to life. That’s why I look so... old now.”

“Not that old.”

Rudy furrowed her brow. “You believe me?”

“About looking old? No. You look... what... forty? Forty-three?”

“Somewhere around there. It’s not an exact science.” She leaned forward. “But everything else...?”

Caroline laughed. “I woke up with a stranger’s breath in my mouth and the taste of someone else’s sweat on my lips. Someone kissed me while I was sitting in that wreckage. I remember a flash of horrible pain right before I passed out, and then I remember doctors telling me I was miraculously unharmed. I thought they had me on painkillers. I spent a whole week waiting for the pain to come back, but it never did. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Sherlock Holmes.”

Caroline nodded. “Succubus. The only thing that doesn’t make sense is... you know... giving me life instead of taking it away.”

“I’m trying to turn over a new leaf. I’m calling it sobriety.”

“How is it going?”

Rudy shrugged. “I could have fed off someone to get my youth back. I’ve chosen not to. And it wasn’t even a difficult decision, really. I’m fine with the way I look now.”

“You should be.”

Rudy met Caroline’s gaze. “Are you flirting with me?”

“I might be. Are you gay?”

Rudy smiled. “I might be.” She traced her thumb over the rim of the mug. 

Caroline said, “I don’t know what the rules are for succub...succubusses? Succubi?”

“The second one.”

“Are you allowed to date?”

“Am I...” Rudy shook off her surprise. “Um. Yes. But you don’t have to--”

Caroline said, “Oh, but I do. The woman who saved my life through supernatural means deserves, at the very least, a nice meal in exchange for it.”

Rudy chuckled and gave up any pretense of fighting. “Okay. That sounds really nice. I haven’t had a proper date in a long time.”

“Who said it was a date?” Caroline said with a teasing lilt to her voice.

“I... it wasn’t...”

“I’m teasing you. It’s absolutely a date. But we can work that out later.” She gestured at Rudy’s coffee. “Right now we can just get to know one another.”

Rudy picked up her mug. “Where should we start?”

#

“I’m Robert,” the group leader said. “And I’ve been clean for eighteen years and three months. Who...” He sat up straighter in surprise when Rudy lifted her hand. “Rudiger. Of course, please, start us off.”

Rudy smiled nervously at the group. “My name is Rudy, and I’ve been clean for... for, ah, six months.” She tried not to look at Celeste when she said the revised sobriety date.

“Hi, Rudy.”

“I know I don’t usually share, because I feel like I don’t have anything new to add to the group. But as you can all tell just by looking at me, it’s been an unusual couple of months. I witnessed a car accident. It was early, the paramedics were still minutes away, and the other car just took off. The woman was dying, or dead, and I couldn’t just stand there and watch it happen. So I siphoned off some of my own energy and gave it to her. I brought her back to life.”

Robert said, “Wow. That’s very admirable, Rudiger.”

She ignored his praise. “I knew that I could get my youth back as easy as... going to a bar and finding someone to feed off. But I obviously didn’t. It’s not even a fight anymore. I feel like given the opportunity, I would be able to restrain myself. I’m not saying that I’m cured or that I’ve even turned a corner, but I didn’t want people to be alarmed if I suddenly stopped showing up.”

Robert smiled. “We’ve all been where you are, Rudy. We’ve felt that thrill of turning down a few opportunities and suddenly we think we can do it alone. That’s when we tend to stumble the hardest.”

She smiled. “No offense, Rob, because the group has gotten me this far. It’s been a real life-saver. Sometimes literally. But I think I’m going to see what it’s like without the training wheels for a while.” She stood up and took her jacket off the back of the chair. “To be completely honest, the main reason I came back this time was because of the cookies. So good luck to everyone.” She finally looked at Celeste, who had an unreadable expression on her face. Rudy winked at her and left the group behind.

Rudy put the jacket on as she walked through the dark hall of Multi-Purpose Rooms filled with people talking out their problems, working through issues, sobbing into tissues when they realized they weren’t alone in the world. There were other people out there going through the same thing. There was strength in that, she knew. But sometimes the fix could only be found from within. She felt like she’d gone as far as she could leaning against the wall and now she needed to see how far she could go without the safety net. It helped that she wasn’t going to be doing it completely alone.

Outside, a sedan was waiting near the door. The headlights flashed at her as she came out, and she smiled as she jogged over.

Caroline leaned over to open the door for her. Rudy slipped into the passenger seat and greeted her new friend with a quick kiss on the corner of her mouth.

“That didn’t take long,” she said.

“There was no reason to stay for the whole thing. Here.” She took a much-folded paper towel from her pocket. “I got you a cookie.”

Caroline took it from her. “Thank you, Rudy.” She unwrapped the towel and took a bite. “Oh, my God. This is almost worth sitting through an entire meeting for.”

“Right?” She grinned and unwrapped her own cookie. “So where are we going for dinner?”

“I thought maybe it should be savior’s choice.”

Rudy glared at her. “That’s not going to be a thing, is it?”

“Oh, it already is. My hero.” She leaned across the console and kissed Rudy. They both had cookie crumbs on their lips. 

“Fine. Then I choose my apartment. I’ll provide the cookware and the ingredients, and you can make a meal worthy of a savior.”

Caroline said, “I think I can handle that. And... maybe I could stay over this time.”

Rudy winced.

“Unless you’re not ready.” She put her hand on top of Rudy’s. “I understand how big it would be for you. I don’t want to push you into anything you’re not ready for. Hell, doing that could kill me. I just wanted you to know that whenever you’re ready, I will be, too.”

Rudy lifted Caroline’s hand to kiss the knuckles. “We’ll see what happens.”

Caroline smiled. “I’m fine with that. So...” She put her hand back on the wheel. “Shall we?”

“Drive on. And try to stay out of any accidents. I’m not exactly keen to get into the savior business full-time.”

“I’ll be extremely careful.”

“Good.” 

Rudy fastened her seatbelt just as a precaution as Caroline pulled out of the spot. She didn’t know if she was ready for Caroline to be an overnight guest. They had done a few things, sexual things that in the past would have resulted in a feeding, but Rudy had been able to control herself. She never took anything from Caroline no matter how hot and heavy their make-out sessions lasted. Still, sex was a completely different thing. She didn’t know if she would be able to separate her emotions from her physical needs. 

Regardless of what happened after dinner, it was good to know Caroline was both ready and willing to wait depending on what Rudy decided. She had taken extremely well to dating a succubus. And while Caroline frequently mentioned how lucky she was that Rudy had been jogging at that precise moment in that exact place, Rudy knew that she was the true lucky one.

Wherever the night took them, and wherever the road ahead was leading, Rudy felt confident that she would be ready sooner rather than later. She’d already lost a decade to Caroline, and she didn’t want to waste one second more than absolutely necessary before they took the next step.


End file.
